October 15, 2012 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. For other up-to-the-minute news, check out ITIís Twitter account: @ITINewsBreaks.

Apress Media, LLC, a publisher of technology books, launched ApressOpen, a program that offers technology companies and professionals the opportunity to publish technical and business content under an open access model. With ApressOpen, content will be freely available through multiple online distribution channels and electronic formats with the goal of disseminating professionally edited and technically reviewed content to the worldwide community.

Apress has also announced that it is working with Intel Corp. to publish at least 10 books under the ApressOpen brand. Intel is providing assistance with content architecture with resources from its Industry Education Office. “Our aim is to publish content that is strategically aligned with industry-leading companies and globally recognized, topic-expert authors who are on the cutting edge of innovative technologies. Making the resulting content free and available to the widest possible audience will assure great, favorable impact for the computer industry and other industries over time. We’re excited to work with Intel on some of our first ApressOpen titles, so that the computer industry may quickly benefit from Intel’s unique insights in computer innovation,” says Jeffrey M. Pepper, assistant publisher at Apress.

ApressOpen content will be distributed on SpringerLink with more than 122 million unique visitors per year as well as on Apress.com, Intel.com, and all major ebook and database platforms.

Source: Apress Media, LLC

HarperCollins, Publishing Technology to Build Global Product Manager

HarperCollins Publishers, a subsidiary of News Corp., announced that it will roll out a new global publishing system, one of the largest undertakings of its kind to be implemented by a trade publisher. Global Product Manager, developed in partnership with Publishing Technology, LLC, will enable HarperCollins to unify editorial, marketing, and business data around the world, widening the reach of its print and digital publications in its core target markets.

By integrating systems and assets across the globe, the new centralized system will provide the company with the long-term infrastructure needed to maximize its catalog of books, ebooks, and apps. It will transform the way staff members view, manage, and share product information throughout the publishing life cycle.

Built on Publishing Technology’s advance platform, Global Product Manager will empower HarperCollins staff to explore current and future content delivery types and business models while enabling better metadata management that will improve the discoverability of its products. Other expected benefits include the following:

Greater visibility, consistency, and reliability of product data

Best-in-class metadata maintenance to drive marketing strategies

Ability to better leverage rights, aggregate content, and create new business models

Robust scheduling and tracking capability to monitor cost and performance

Improve relationships with retailers and authors through improved access to data

Best-practice sharing of information across geographical regions

The advance system is a publishing operations software package supporting product and relationship management, contracts, rights, royalties, permissions, content monetization, and fulfillment. With advance applications, publishers can manage processes from end to end, maximize all revenue streams, and transform from print to digital business models.

The HarperCollins system will be rolled out first in the U.S., followed by the U.K., and subsequently Canada, Australia, and to the Christian Publishing Division through 2013.

Source: Publishing Technology, LLC

ProQuest Continues to Upgrade Health and Medical Databases

ProQuest substantially enhanced its coverage in the Massachusetts Medical Society’s New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) by launching a full-text version of the British Nursing Index (BNI) and adding PsycTESTS from the American Psychological Association (APA). Now, in addition to full-text integration of NEJM in its information products and a collection of classic images and deep index images, ProQuest will provide access to Journal Watch, the medical literature surveillance newsletter series. The expanded agreement between ProQuest and NEJM extends aggregation and distribution rights to ProQuest for multiple years. For example, ProQuest now has image rights, paving the way for the company to employ its patented deep indexing process, which will enable researchers to easily search and discover content such as raw data within illustrations. Further, the NEJM backfile now dates from 1990 rather than its previous 1993 beginning.

The new Journal Watch content comprises an edited clinical series covering 13 specialties, including cardiology, hospital medicine, pediatrics, and women’s health. Journal Watch Physician Editorial Boards survey the medical literature, select the most important research and guidelines, distill them into focused summaries, and frame them in a clinical context. In addition, they cover the most important medical news, drug information, and public health alerts. New articles will be available 90 days after their original publication date.

Just 15 months after acquiring the BNI, ProQuest released a full-text version of the product. BNI Full-Text is available for the first time in the new ProQuest research environment, enabling it to be cross-searched with such resources as ProQuest Nursing and Allied Health and supported with advanced content management tools. BNI focuses on titles published in the U.K., Australia, and Canada; it also includes a selection of important international nursing titles. It is updated monthly. Its full-text version encompasses more than 600,000 records and more than 190,000 indexed records, plus links to other sources.

The addition of APA’s PsycTESTS database provides descriptive summaries, full text, and relevant citations on the development and assessment of more than 6,000 tests and measures used in research and teaching.

Source: ProQuest

Summon Adds Content From Elsevier Scopus, International Sources

Serials Solutions, a ProQuest business, will index content in Scopus, an abstract and citation database from Elsevier, and expose its citation counts in the Summon discovery service. Serials Solutions’ pioneering approach to displaying citation counts in Summon search results—along with pop-ups including links to citing articles within the discovery environment—enables users to interact with this valuable information without interrupting the research workflow.

Serials Solutions’ unique “match and merge” technology brings together information from multiple sources to create a single record optimized for discovery. The inclusion of Scopus content in the Summon unified index—and the advanced capability of match and merge—will aid in the discovery of full-text content from other providers, as well as valuable Scopus citation-only results. Also, using Scopus cited-by counts as a factor in Summon relevancy ranking will ensure users surface the most scholarly and relevant content in their results. The Scopus abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature contains more than 47 million records and 19,500 titles from 5,000 international publishers.

Serials Solutions also signed agreements with AskZad, ciando GmbH, the European Patent Office, and Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN SA. Content from all participating providers is normalized to a common search schema in the Summon index.

ciando GmbH is a provider of fiction and nonfiction ebooks, as well as literature from all areas of science. Metadata for 155,000 ebooks from 600 publishers will be added to the Summon unified index. Nearly 90% of the ebooks are in German, and the company works with a number of major German universities and institutional libraries.

The European Patent Office publications include material about inventions and technical developments dating from 1836. About 70 million patent documents from Espacenet will be discoverable through Summon.

Wydawnictwo Naukowe is one of the largest scientific publishers in Poland and includes metadata for more than 3,000 ebook titles in Polish.

Another Serials Solutions agreement with Hyweb Technology will enable the discovery of Serials Solutions Chinese journal content from Summon. The inclusion of metadata for Hyweb’s more than 900 journals represents 90% of Taiwanese journals published. The Summon service offers advanced native language searching capabilities for 17 languages, and a new Chinese-language searching enhancement enables users to search Chinese titles and authors with Pinyin separated spaces at the character level.

Source: Serials Solutions

New FOIAonline Platform Launched

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the U.S. Department of Commerce have partnered to develop an online system aimed at expanding public access to information requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). FOIAonline, formerly known as the FOIA Module, is available to offer the public one place to submit FOIA requests, track their progress, communicate with the processing agency, search other requests, access previously released responsive documents, and file appeals with participating agencies.

EPA began looking at the feasibility of a FOIA portal in 2010 with the idea of leveraging Regulations.gov, the federal rulemaking portal that allows people to comment on federal regulations and other agency regulatory actions. EPA administers Regulations.gov, which has helped FOIAonline avoid many startup costs, resulting in a total of $1.3 million to launch and an estimated cost avoidance of $200 million over the next 5 years if broadly adopted.

Six federal agencies now have partnered to develop and deploy FOIAonline along with EPA, including the Department of Commerce, NARA, the Department of the Treasury, the Federal Labor Relations Authority, and the Merit Systems Protection Board, each of which will deploy on its own schedule.

Source: National Archives and Records Administration

Science.gov Adds Multimedia, Spanish Translations, and More Search Features

Science.gov, the gateway to U.S. federal science hosted by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) of the Department of Energy, now includes multimedia content and additional features, including an updated interface with enhanced navigation. For the first time, R&D video from the DOE ScienceCinema is available, as well as from MedlinePLUS, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Images from the Library of Congress have been added to the image search, which is now integrated under a new multimedia tab on the results page. Search enhancements include visual representations of topical information in an easy-to-use touch and dial format.

In addition, a Spanish version of the site has been launched. Ciencia.Science.gov provides the same breadth and depth in scientific search as does Science.gov, covering more than 200 million pages of authoritative U.S. government science information. This includes free access to R&D results from 17 organizations within 13 federal science agencies and more than 55 scientific databases and 2,100 selected scientific websites. Integrating Microsoft’s Translator, Spanish-language queries to Science.gov initiate searches of U.S. databases and websites with results appearing in Spanish.

Science.gov includes key DOE R&D databases of full-text documents, citations, patents, eprints, accomplishments, multimedia, data, software, and more, all covered in the DOE Science Accelerator. OSTI conceived and helped launched Science.gov in December 2002 to get DOE R&D results out to the scientific community and beyond—and to get the community’s results into DOE. Traffic to the site has grown enormously over the past 10 years; while there were some 750,000 Science.gov page requests in its first year, these grew to more than 34 million in the 2012 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

Science.gov is governed by the interagency Science.gov Alliance, which includes the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, the Interior, and Transportation; the Environmental Protection Agency; the Library of Congress; NASA; the National Archives and Records Administration; and NSF. These agencies represent 97% of the federal R&D budget.